Perspective

In early 2000, I returned to school to earn a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT. My roommate was a sturdy woman from Michigan. Both of us were used to the cold and often during that first winter semester we rose at 6 a.m. and booted, hatted, and mittened, we walked for 45 minutes before breakfast.

One chilly day we decided to walk into the town to fetch a couple of gallons of drinking water. We bundled up as usual and walked the half mile down the hill to the store. There were very few cars on the road and still fewer people. In fact, we hadn’t seen a single soul until we entered the store. At the clang of the bell over the door, the young clerk looked up in surprise. We grabbed two gallon jugs of water each and approached her, smiling. She rang us up and then asked, “Are you guys from the college?” We said we were and she shook her head. “Did you drive down?” she asked. We said, no, we’d walked. Why?

“I’ve heard there’s some strange folks up there,” she told us. “Who else would walk down the hill for water when it’s 40 below zero?”

Roomie and I looked at each other. 40 below? Really? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The hike back uphill seemed much colder than the walk down and by the time we reached our dormitory, half the water in each jug was frozen.

My outdoor thermometer this morning read 3° and the wind chill is bringing the temperature down to a balmy -13°. But, I’m running low on milk – anyone up for a walk today?

Flying

The plane gathers speed on the runway, lifts and banks, making a deal with gravity. Green rushes by the windows in a blur. Sunlight glints off the wings, trees and houses grow smaller and smaller, roadways stretch long and black, like thick lines drawn with a carpenter’s pencil. Buildings flatten out, lose their three dimensional quality, becoming pop-ups in a child's book.

Go up high enough and things begin to disappear. Cars on the road turn invisible. People on the ground vanish. At 10,000 feet, search as I might, I can see no movement below me, only green forests and brown fields as far as the eye can see. The sky takes on aspects of the sea. Waves of clouds billow and roll creating shorelines with sharp blue edges. Vast expanses of white spread like water all around until it is impossible to tell what is earth and what is sky. When the clouds break, fingers of sunlight reach down to gild lake surfaces or trace river water as it winds its way through the landscape. Our shadow flies below us, an impossibly small, plane-shaped image.

Where there is turbulence, the clouds loom, large, gray-white, and menacing. It seems odd to look at monster cumulus clouds at eye level. They shape themselves to mimic rearing horses, rushing trains, towering cliffs. Even close up, they look substantial, as if they are made of sterner stuff than water vapor. We fly past them and through them, bucking and rocking in the wind.

When I look away from the window the feeling of detachment vanishes. People are reading, sleeping, walking up and down the aisles, talking, eating, drinking—doing much as they would at home, acting as if they didn’t know they were trapped high above the earth in a speeding metal tube. I don’t know anything about them, save that they are traveling from one place to another, and once the plane lands, will all go about their business as if the miracle of flight had not occurred.

I look out the window again. A plane going in the opposite direction sails into view and out again so quickly I wonder if I’ve imagined it. There are no clouds now between my eye and the earth. We are flying along the eastern seaboard, ocean on one hand, land on the other. Boats pull through the water, leaving silvery wakes that glisten in the sunlight. Rivers and their tributaries twist and turn, making patterns like those of ancient cave drawings. I trace them with my eyes, seeing how each one branches in a unique design and yet bears a resemblance to all the rest.

As we near our destination the plane gradually loses altitude, descending in narrowing circles until the runway is in sight. Cars dot the roadways now and buildings loose their flat look, re-emerging as concrete and four-sided. People reappear as ants, scurrying from one place to another. Slowly, slowly, the landscape takes on familiar proportions. The clouds are above our heads again, the earth solid and compact under our feet. The plane brakes, shudders, rattles along the ground and once more we are visible to all except those who fly high above us.

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Still Lives

Me and my camera

the giant blue sky

the endless circle of horizon

the great mound of the mountain

stolid behind tapering trees

the far shore of the pond

the water, ice crusted and still,

the jumble of roadside brush

full of chittering finches

the one oak leaf that would not let go

the soft cap of snow in an abandoned nest

the fragile ice on Queen Anne’s lace

the drop of frozen water at the tip of a branch

the shadow of a single vine on a fence board

our eyes, one alive, one mechanical

recorded it all

They are pictures of silence

of quietude

of moments and shadows

still shots of life

that despite being captured

spill into the day, singing,

as though me and my camera

did not exist

except as still shots

Learning to See

It’s not wise to think that there’s only one way to see things. Occasionally it’s a good idea to look at the world from a different perspective, to turn things topsy-turvy. Today the outdoors tugged at me like wind at a kite string so I pulled on my coat and boots and set off across the fields. In the center of one is a great heap of rocks piled up when the field was plowed under for corn. I climb to the top and sit in the hollow of the largest boulder. From there my view of the meadow alters.

Over the tops of the willows that line the creek bank I can see a third field with rows upon rows of old corn stubble converging to a point at one corner of the woods. I spy a small brown bird clinging to the tattered spike of a cattail. It sways slightly in the wind and I hear it singing, “Here I am, here I am, oh mine, this one’s mine.”

Over my head two geese wing their way through the too-blue sky, their harsh cries echoing down to me like falling leaves. Farther on, a red-tailed hawk sits on a branch high above me and watches me watching it. I climb into the lower branches of a sturdy tree and look down as the hawk does. My view of the earth changes again and so do my thoughts. With my feet ground-anchored and my eyes looking up I contemplated flight. Standing shakily on a tree limb looking down, I think of falling.

A dusting of snow on fallen leaves forms a patterned carpet and the sky is bracketed by tree branches sketched in sepia. Safely back on the ground I search for a soft dry place to lie down and discover a hollow. I snuggle in and the whole world becomes suddenly smaller to my eyes, encompassed by leaf covered banks and tree trunks and thick branches that allow only tiny glimpses of the sky. Here where my view is limited, I can let my imagination soar. When I was a child, this came easier. I was less reluctant to let go of my rational mind, more able to move unrestricted through the worlds inside my head. I could be the hawk soaring above and the girl on the ground and know them both from my protected place.

I have learned to acknowledge that while all things change, they stay the same. The wind still blows, even if I cannot feel it in the hollow. The sky changes from blue to smoke to dusk. At the end of today tomorrow waits, and tomorrow I will see everything differently.

Recycling

The pond across the road from my cottage. It is one of nature's ever-changing paintings.

Theelementary posted a delightful piece of writing about looking at familiar things from a different perspective. It reminded me of a post I wrote two springs ago. (You'll notice a reference to greening grass and budded branches. We're a far cry from that at the moment as more snow is falling.) Anyhow, in the interest of recycling, here it is again.

Ancient wisdom suggests we look at each day not as if it was our last, but with new eyes, as if every day was our first. Finding that thought compelling, I step out into the sunrise and am struck by the beauty and the mystery of everything around me. What would it mean to see grass for the first time, green and growing, each blade individual and new, rising from the dried and tangled mat of last year’s growth, yet each shoot blending and waving with its counterparts until they spread out before the eye like a verdant sea? Imagine the wonder at touching a bare foot to the dew-drenched stuff, seeing an imprint dark and mysterious appear, then watching it fade as though you did not exist as the sun rises and drinks the condensation.

What of the lilac tree by the door, its trunk gnarled and twisted, the bark rough and scaly, the branches dusted with the bright green of spring-coiled leaves waiting to open? If you had no word for tree, no language to describe the budded arms that would soon be brimming with lushly scented flowers, wouldn’t the wonder of it all sweep you away?

I leave my yard to walk along the edge of the pond in the growing light and watch the sun coat the ripples with silver. Last year’s dried oak leaves dance toward me in a sudden gust of wind even as this year’s prepare to unfurl. I look up and my eye is caught by the movement of small birds high over the pond, swallows perhaps. They are too far up for me to tell, but their joy is clear as they swoop and rise and sail out over the water and back, diving and skimming and soaring again and again. The sun touches the undersides of their wings so that they seem to float on feathers of pure light.

The wind swoops through the tops of the pines, rushing from one to the next, whispering green secrets. The boughs rise and fall as though breathing and I am caught up in the sound and the rhythmic dance of needles against sky. Then the wind is at my feet, whirling the loose sand into miniature cyclones before blowing off across the open fields, losing itself in the woods at meadow’s edge. Later in the afternoon and into the evening as the light wanes and the day’s colors melt into darkness, I will walk once more beside the pond, watching the water, different water now, new water, make its way to the falls. I will understand again that nothing lasts, though nothing appears to change, and tomorrow and tomorrow I will see again with new eyes the same ordinary things.